Jean Bénabou is a French mathematician working in category theory. He studied under the supervision of Charles Ehresmann and received his Phd from the University of Paris in 1966. He supervised Michel Coste and Marie-Francoise Roy for their Phd.
In his thesis, Bénabou introduced the notion of category with multiplication, a notion equivalent to that of monoidal category introduced independantly by Mac Lane. He later introduced the notions of 2-category and of bicategory. He developed the theory of distributors. He has proposed a foundational approach to mathematics based on fibered categories.